Friday, June 29, 2007

I May Be a Facebook Whore


I found a couple of my bosses on Facebook today and nearly added them. What the heck was I thinking? Even though I try to be careful what I put up and who can get to different parts of it, I don't really want to facilitate their combing through my profile because I never know what is going to be interpreted as an NCAA violation.

I also get the sense that's exactly why the bosses are on there.

Ummmmmmmmm...yeeeeeeah...I'm going to have to decline that friend request....

Little Man's all the friend I need!

Terrible

Since he's been in jail, it seems that Michael Lohan's main medium of communication with his daughter Lindsay is via the press release. Upon his release, he has stuck with this old standard.

Plus, he misspelled his eldest daughter's name.

I think I might be in rehab too between the "best friend" mom Dina and this guy.

I Realize that I'm Lagging....

I'll have a nice post or a few for you this weekend though. It's been an epic week at work.

Happy Friday!

Monday, June 25, 2007

Friday, June 22, 2007

Lolcats are the Only Creatures that Know What My Life is Like

lolcats funny cat pictures

If this is what you woke up to every morning, you wouldn't want to get up either.

He's So Excited

"I'm going to register for bathtub duckies. Lots of them."
--Fiance on setting up our bridal registry

Thursday, June 21, 2007

Tuesday, June 19, 2007

A Little Help?


Fiance is coming to town this weekend, and I need a new recipe to try out on him. Any suggestions?

Here's my offering in return: Ursa and I made Rice Krispies treats tonight with a handful of butterscotch morsels added in for good measure.

Serve with good, thick chocolate milk and enjoy the heavenly bliss.

*I realize this does not qualify as a recipe, but that doesn't mean it's not one heck of a good idea.

Saturday, June 16, 2007

Recipe, Courtesy of the Food Network

Tried this one last weekend, and Fiance and I loved it. Personally, I think it's better with a little more ricotta and regular pasta, but this came out good anyway.

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1 pound whole-wheat linguine
1/2 cup part-skim ricotta
3 tablespoons olive oil
1/2 pound French green beans, trimmed and halved lengthwise
1 clove garlic, chopped
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1 cup halved cherry tomatoes
1 lemon, zested
Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil over high heat. Add the pasta and cook until tender but still firm to the bite, stirring occasionally, about 8 to 10 minutes. Drain pasta reserving 1 cup of the cooking water. Transfer the hot pasta to a large bowl and add the ricotta cheese. Toss to combine.

Meanwhile, in a large, heavy skillet, warm the olive oil over medium-high heat. Add the green beans, garlic, salt, and pepper and saute for 4 minutes. Add 1 cup of the pasta cooking liquid and continue cooking until tender, about 4 more minutes. Add the pasta with ricotta to the pan with the green beans and toss to combine. Add the tomatoes and gently toss. Transfer to a serving plate and top with lemon zest. Serve.

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Click here to find the recipe in its original context.

Friday, June 15, 2007

Lest you wonder--as my maintenance man did today--what I am doing with my Friday nights now that Fiance is out of town, I can tell you right now.

Light some candles, don my favorite pair of jammies (I have several, but my very favorite are flannel), pour a generous glass of wine in one of my good glasses, and listen to Phantom of the Opera (the original cast CD) from start to finish. Then, I collect the cat and hie myself off to bed.

All in all, not a shabby evening.

A Blog Is Born


You Can't Fire Me! I Quit!

According to some, this season of television has been somewhat obsessed with unemployment. I get that, I think. The "talent" doesn't seem to be fired very often in Hollywood, and I have witnessed a lot of reluctance to fire the incompetent or just plain disadvantageous over the scant years of my work experience as well.

A lot of people have been asking whether firing Isaiah Washington from Grey's Anatomy went too far. I think that the simplest answer, for me, lies in those speeches they give you when you start a new job about how you represent the company when you go about your day-to-day life. The point being that if you embarrass them out in your private life they may fire you for adversely affecting their image. It's a simple concept to understand, and I think it's probably a good one for Hollywood employers to remind their employees of every once in a while. I imagine that maintaining something resembling a reasonable work environment can be somewhat difficult at times.

On a more personal note, I think that the little trend of going to rehab for saying offensive/intolerant/stupid/generally unacceptable things is just as distasteful as saying those things. Washington said something homophobic, insensitive, and uncharitable. Unless he was drunk or high at work when he said it, there isn't really a call to blame that choice to speak on an addiction. That was the basis on which Mel Gibson tried to smooth over his asinine behavior with rehab: he was driving under the influence while it happened. That doesn't make what he said blamable on alcohol, it just means that his inhibitions were low enough to say that terrible thing he thought. Washington's focus in trying to win back public favor should have been to make some overtures to those he offended, admit abject jackass behavior, and maybe go do something positive in the homosexual community. Even being honest enough to just admit negative feelings about homosexuality would have been braver and, perhaps on some level, better received that retreating to rehab. Better no apology than a terrible one.

I'm not sure that rehab would have been good enough for Washington if a white actor had called him the N-word.

Wednesday, June 13, 2007

Where Have I Been?


Cleaning, mostly.

I'm the kind of messy that turns up in those shows where an intervention over the person's entire life is pitched. The room pictured above is not mine, but instead looks neat by comparison. That's how bad.

Anyway, Fiance came to visit last weekend, my father's going to be in town just for the day tomorrow, Ursa will be staying with me Monday, and Fiance will be back in town a week from Friday. The end result is that I have been waging war on my entire apartment with a bottle of bleach in one hand and a bottle of Febreeze in the other (and a Mr. Clean Magic Eraser handily in my back pocket).

The living room took three days. As you can see, I'm not really working with three days' worth of space here. The kitchen and bathroom took another couple of days, and I'm still working on the bedroom. The big challenge with the bedroom has been wading through all of the laundry. Somehow, having to pay for laundry has just been crippling to my ability to actually, well, do laundry. At some point, it all just started piling up at a rate that threatened to give my student debt total a run for its money.

About eleven loads later, I still can't really see much difference, and I think that to even see as much as I do one would have to have been on very familiar terms with the original mess.

Anyway, things are slowly progressing to the point that I may return to blogging. As my friend, Allegria, put it, "Wow. You have a floor." Although she did say it in a rather tentative sort of way....

Monday, June 04, 2007

My car is back in the shop. Ugh.

In Yet More Legal News


Some judges are even snarkier than the exhausted attorney in today's previous post. I have the vague sense that this is what Poseur would write like as a judge.

But I'm Too Sleepy for "The Big M!"

The below has been copied and pasted from an AP story. If you want to see it in its original context, click away.

MEMPHIS, Tenn. - A defense attorney tried a different argument to win his convicted client a new murder trial: The attorney was too sleepy.

Charles R. Curbo wrote in a motion for a new trial that he could not properly represent the defendant, Tony Wolfe, because he was tired during the six-day trial in January.

"The court constantly rushed defense counsel, who the court knew had little sleep on account of the hours that the court was keeping for no good reason," Curbo wrote.

Prosecutor David Zak said he saw no lack of enthusiasm from the defense.

"The defense attorney showed anger, passion and zeal in representing his client. There was never a moment when he was running out of gas," Zak said.

Wolfe was convicted of first-degree murder in the fatal shooting of Leondus Hawkins, 27, in September 2004 at a service station parking lot. He was sentenced to life in prison.

But both sides said the trial held long and late hours due to Wolfe's medical condition and because the judge wanted to send the sequestered jury home as quickly as possible.

Wolfe required dialysis treatments every other morning, keeping the trial from starting until early afternoon for some days. The proceedings went on until 10 or 11 p.m. on some days.

The judge is scheduled to rule on the motion in July.